I just bought a Sony Vaio laptop from Fry's last month and it is installed with Window Vista Home Premium edition. Lately, it crashes a lot. (This week alone it has already crashed three times.) It crashes when I leave it on for awhile (about 30 minutes) and when I come back I find that it is frozen. It also crashes when I am just browsing the internet or playing online games.

The laptop has 1GB memory, and I heard that to run Vista you need at least that much. So what could be the problem? Is it just defective? I find that it's so unnatural that a new laptop can crash so frequently.

In the future, how do I prevent this from happening so frequently again? Should I just close all the applications when I leave it? Or should I just put it on Hibernate or Stand By? What's the difference anyway?

Sorry I'm asking so many questions, but I really hope you guys can help me! I am starting to worry about this laptop!

Start>Run in seach box>Right click on the Run command and use the Run as Admin>then type in eventvwr.msc in the box that comes up. This will bring up your event viewer and tell you what things have caused yoru crash.

On a side note Vista SP1 was jsut finalized today and should be available with the next set of updates. When it is ready get it.

I opened the Event Viewer, and I saw that under the Error tab, there is 4 cases that is caused by SidebySide. I looked it up on the Internet and it says it is a spyware. It is strange because I never detect it during a virus scan. And I can't find that I install that program in the first place.

I click on it and it says "Activation context generation failed for "C:\Windows\Installer\{67E03279-F703-408F-B4BF-46B5FC8D70CD}\wksdb.exe". Dependent Assembly msadctls,processorArchitecture="x86",type="win32", version="1.0.1801.0" could not be found. Please use sxstrace.exe for detailed diagnosis.tt"

So what does that mean? It's somehow connected the the Microsoft works? Can I just disable it or something?

How do I just delete SidebySide manually to avoid my laptop crashing in the future?

Carnage is right. Go to the Virus area and follow Osiris's guide and post a JiJack this log in the Analyze area. There you can get your spyware problems resolved and if the problem still persists stop on back after you get a clean bill of health from Osiris.